"Grape" Weekend and Soldier Hollow Sheep Trials Classic and Thunderstruck Bookclub

Paul continues to recover. This week Monday-Friday he went into work for a couple of hours. He still isn’t sleeping very well, lots of interrupted sleep, but he is no longer taking any of the narcotic pain relievers, and is getting a long better. He still isn’t attending events with me, though. Being in large groups that could potentially bump into him or accidently brush by him roughly kept him wanting to stay close to home. After he has put in a couple of hours at work he is really ready to come home and take a nap. He is anticipating starting physical therapy next week. My book clubs are starting up again. One of them met last week and one of them will be meeting this week. The book we read for last week’s meeting was Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. This was non-fiction and quite interesting, but has been reviewed quite negatively. Most of our bookclub group found it an informative read—exposing us to stuff we were totally unfamiliar with. In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen a mousey salesman and con-man who is accused of killing his wife, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of wireless communication which at the time seemed almost like some kind of magic--whose lives intersect during the flight of Crippen by sea and his identification and capture resulting from the early use of wireless communication from sea to land. The book is set in the early 1900’s and spends more time with Marconi and less time with Crippen. I learned so much about the invention period and the trials of the innovator; his failures before he had success. Marconi faced incredible odds and the competition nipping at his heels and so much skepticism it is a wonder he succeeded at all. I was amazed at the level of suspense that could be generated in a story where we know from the beginning that radio ended up being a successful endeavor. The Crippen story is tragic, but also interesting in its own way. This is the second Erik Larson book I have read. His specialty is taking historical events and reviewing them in the style of a novel, and he does a good job of it. I have also read his In the Garden of Beasts—set in WWII. But his most famous book is The Devil in the White City. This weekend has been a “grape” weekend. We have been harvesting our grapes. We have an arbor in the back yard which isn’t enough to contain our vines which have branched out to our scrub oak trees and our fruit trees and so we have grapes everywhere. Friday night I picked a couple of big bowls worth, just the clumps that were easily in reach. Then the grapes have to be removed from all the stems and so it takes a while to prepare them. I usually heat them up in an eight quart stock pot that I have to release the juice, but there were so many that on Friday night I tried something that I have never tried before. I cooked all that I could fit on the stove top and then I filled my eight quart crock pot with the grapes, put it on low and let them “cook” overnight. It was a great success, actually better than the stove top method because the liquid was so much clearer and not cloudy like it is when I stove top cook the grapes. Usually when I stove top, I have to wait 24 hours while the liquid settles, but this was so clear that I was able to use it right away, bearing in mind that it took seven hours to slow cook. On Saturday Paul came out with me and held the ladder and picked bunches that were within his reach. And we gathered twice as many grapes as I had gathered the day before by myself. And so I spent Saturday day doing grapes. I picked the grapes off the stems and also made grape juice concentrate, and grape syrup. Picking the grapes off the stems took a long, long time, because there were so many bunches of grapes that we harvested. And without belaboring the time involved and the number of crockpots at seven hours each, and the dishwasher running several times a day with bottles, and all the various sticky bowls, pots, measuring cups and utensils in it, two trips to the store to buy sugar and pectin and just the work involved—I ended up Monday night with 31 pints of grape juice concentrate, grape syrup and grape jelly. All in a weekend’s work. Since we knew that we weren’t going to the cabin over Labor Day, which we usually do, I have been planning on going up to Soldier Hollow to attend the Sheep Dog Trials. I have been casually interested in this sport since watching the movie Babe back in the 1990’s. They have a huge competition in this rural area of the Heber Valley every year over Labor Day. Erika went with Jono’s family two years ago and reported that it was pretty interesting. Originally, it was going to be with Paul, too, but he still isn’t up to attending large gatherings where bumping is a possibility. So he stayed home. I got tickets for Erika, Jono and me. And it was a really fun event, we had a great time. And what happens you might ask? The world’s most highly trained border collies and their handlers walk out to the post in front of all of us spectators. (And I was wildly impressed by how many there were—thousands of people) High up on the mountainside, which we faced, a group of wild range sheep are released. And they are far away, the field where the event takes place is big, about four hundred yards by six hundred yards or so. And Solider Hollow has a reputation for the world’s wildest sheep. One handler called them “wicked.” The dog must race up the hillside and listening to the whistles of his master must carefully gather the sheep. There are a number of feats and skills that the dog must accomplish with the sheep and the sheep have to figure out that the dog can be trusted and then do what the dog directs. The dogs never barked. Two groups of eight sheep are released on the hillside in different places and the dog must bring them down the hillside and bring them through some free standing “gates”, gather the two groups together, herd them around the “post” where the handler stands, and then run them through two more sets of “gates” across the entire length of the course and then the handler and the dog have to separate out some of the sheep from the rest of the group. (Some of the sheep have red collars and some do not.) and then the separated group are put into a small pen. It all has to be done in twenty-five minutes. We did not see a perfect run all day and there were fifteen teams. They start with 170 points and then lose points every time there is some kind of mistake. The highest score of the day was 153. The dogs and the handlers were amazing, but trying to separate five sheep out of sixteen is hard work for both dog and handler. Monday was the Grand Championship round, but the trials had been going on all weekend and we were watching the fifteen best. We got there at about 10:30 and five competitor’s had already gone---we watched four handlers and dogs compete and then wandered off for a while to watch some of the other attractions going on at the same time. There were other dog related activities not connected to the trials per se. The County had a demonstration of their dogs, which are part of their K9 unit. There was a “long jump” for dogs which they did in a Splash Pool—leaping after an airborne toy, which was really fun to watch and there was an agility course with lots of obstacles for a great variety of breeds and dogs of varying sizes to compete on. Also very interesting. And there were vendors and food and demonstrations of various kinds all day long. After a while we went back and watched three more competitors of the sheep trials and then finished for the day. I got home at about 4:30 in time to do three more batches of grape products. So it was a busy day and lots of fun.